WPRB has spent most of a century getting to things before everyone else. Long before it became one of America's most respected freeform stations, it started as a scrappy campus AM outlet, and its instinct for being early never really went away.
From Campus AM to the First College Station on FM
According to WPRB's own history, the station traces back to WPRU, a campus AM outlet launched December 6, 1940, by Princeton student H. Grant Theis, often cited as the oldest commercially licensed campus radio station in the country. In 1955, that station picked up an FM license and became WPRB, the first college station ever to broadcast on the FM dial, after discovering the WPRU call letters were already taken by a ship. It has shifted frequency twice since, settling on its current 103.3 MHz spot in 1962.
Once the Most Powerful Student Station on Earth
WPRB did not stay a small campus signal for long. A 1960 power boost pushed it to 17,000 watts from a new antenna atop Princeton's Holder Tower, making it, at the time, the most powerful student-operated radio station in the world, reaching an estimated five million potential listeners across three states. It also became an early pioneer of FM stereo, transmitting in stereo starting in 1964, years before that became standard practice across American radio.
DJs Who Broke Songs Before They Were Hits
WPRB's reputation for being early extends to its programming, not just its engineering. Alumni DJs from its classic-rock era, documented in Princeton Alumni Weekly's retrospective, describe being among the first American stations to play songs like "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "California Dreamin'," positioning WPRB, in one alum's words, on "the leading edge of the Golden Age" of rock radio, well ahead of commercial stations catching on to the same records.
Freeform, Volunteer-Run, and Still Independent
Today WPRB runs a genuinely freeform format spanning shoegaze, jazz, noise, reggae, ska, metal, rap, and more, organized around DJ-curated specialty shows rather than a fixed playlist. It remains financially and editorially independent from Princeton University itself, funded through listener contributions and an annual membership drive that recently passed 700 recurring donors, with student and community volunteers filling out the DJ roster. One longtime host, Jon Solomon, has run a 24-plus-hour Christmas music radiothon nearly every year since 1988.
Tune in to WPRB 103.3 FM on Radio Shuffle for freeform, genre-spanning radio from the station that was first on FM and has spent decades staying ahead of the curve.